Let’s you and me look at this mishap in the widest possible context, with no holds barred. We’ll proceed from the specific to the general, and wrap up with an attempt to gain some wisdom each of us -- from whatever country -- can use in our lives.

It appears that almost everything which could be done wrong while moving K-159 was done wrong: Ballast tank vents, which would have helped keep the hull on the surface, were left open instead of being welded shut. Hatches that should have been dogged to maintain watertight integrity were left open too, including the hatch atop the sail (conning tower in old-fashioned parlance). That the aged reactor cores were not removed before towing the leaky rust-bucket that K-159 had become immediately raised fears of a local ecological disaster. Plans to raise K-159 from where she lies on her side in some 700 feet of water are supposedly under way, but will take at least a year to be implemented.

Russia’s president decried this latest incident as a sign of a broader cultural trend in his nation: ignoring safety in favor of the outward appearance of producing results.

There are other eerie coincidences, which have much greater real-life impact than the time and place of sinking Russian submarines.

1. President Putin’s words about K-159 are remarkably similar to the report on the space shuttle Columbia disaster: a corporate culture within NASA of disregarding safety issues. The report on the loss of Columbia stated that NASA seemed to have learned almost nothing from the Challenger explosion 17 years before.

2. Challenger’s loss occurred at about the same time as the deadly Chernobyl nuclear reactor accident, which may very well be the worst man-made environmental catastrophe in history.

These horrible events, both the old and the new, have direct relevance to military affairs on several levels. Keep in mind that the Chernobyl reactors were such a dangerous design because they were optimized for making weapons-grade plutonium while generating civilian electrical power simultaneously. And the space shuttle fleet represents one of America’s important sources of heavy-lift capacity for payloads going into earth orbit. A number of space shuttle missions have been classified, because they were relevant in some way to serving the needs of our armed forces and intelligence agencies.

That the National Reconnaissance Office, responsible for supplying the U.S. with spy satellites, is now in serious disarray serves to amplify this general problem. It is difficult to manage safety-versus-results without getting bogged down in a morass of expensive bureaucracy that neither achieves adequate safety nor produces good results. To be fair, flawed risk/return tradeoffs can happen in the private sector also.

The problem is indeed pervasive, and it derives from human nature, so it won’t go away on its own. It applies equally to large organizations, which have formal hierarchy and intercommunication structures built in, and to the behavior of masses of separate individual people, whose only hierarchy -- if you could call it that -- are laws and law-enforcement, and whose wholesale intercommunications come mostly from shared pop culture, exposure to common news information sources, and inherent desires for social acceptance or clique conformity. Humankind is always pushing the envelope of risk. This trait was probably vital to the emergence of civilization, so we ought to be glad that many people like taking risks. It is at once our darker side and the force behind our noblest undertakings.

Put differently, and as is well-known to historians of engineering, if everybody was always overly careful then no one would ever dare to experiment with anything new, and we’d all still be wearing animal skins and living in caves.

Many examples of this human trait to constantly take short-cuts and risks, even in the face of safety warnings or when provided with safer equipment, particularly abound in the field of transportation. (The umbrella of “extreme transportation” unifies undersea warfare with outer space.)

At the institutional level, large teams repeatedly made quantum leaps that led to unforgettable failures: the Titanic, the Hindenburg, the Thresher, and the Apollo capsule fire, for instance. In each case complacency and arrogance had to be confronted head on, and changes were made that improved things, at least temporarily. Advancement was never deterred.

At the mass individual level, anti-lock braking, though an important innovation in automobile design, seems to have simply encouraged some drivers to drive a bit less cautiously. Statistics show that the introduction of anti-lock braking did not lead to as many fewer (or less serious) car crashes as had been hoped. The causal disconnect lay not in the technology or manufacturing process, but in the human beings at the wheel. In a similar vein, there’s evidence that ordinances forbidding drivers to use hand-held cell phones when their cars are in motion, while respected at first, are increasingly flouted as folks revert to old habits. The idea that phoning with one hand and driving with the other are an unsafe combo gets short shrift -- implicitly or explicitly, it’s deemed better to keep moving and keep in touch. The price, a possible traffic ticket or traffic accident, is at the gut level seen as acceptably low.

It’s tough to argue with human nature.

And every large organization starts out made up of individuals, so on average (there are of course major exceptions) each employee or executive brings to the office or job site an underlying impulse to get things done more easily and quickly by taking more risk. The alternative, of playing it safe and obeying the rules, is sometimes perceived as creating inconvenient added work and self-imposed delay that might look bad. Utility preferences vary: “Getting more done” could mean grabbing longer on-the-job nap time, or more sneakily stabbing a rival in the back. The problem gets most dangerous when leadership neglect (lousy training, unwise cost-cutting, careerism), and worker peer pressure (showmanship, not listening, a clock-watching mentality), combine to allow and encourage small groups to get narrowly focused and ever more reckless -- while no one grasps the big picture or genuinely accepts overall responsibility. This seems to be what happened in the sinking of K-159.

So what is to be done?

A page can be taken from America’s nuclear navy. Admiral Hyman Rickover insisted on designating permanent inspection teams, who worked at arms length examining ships’ crews and contractors alike, to assure maximum accountability for safety and quality control. Many hard lessons were learned from the loss of USS Thresher too -- and perhaps had to be relearned when USS Scorpion went down -- but the SUBSAFE program remains very active today. And an American nuclear submarine has not been lost in 35 years -- let’s pray this outstanding record continues.

It’s regrettable that both NASA and the Russian Navy failed to implement the high “Rickover/SUBSAFE standards” of discipline, oversight, and procedural best-practices, which are needed to accomplish ideal teamwork year after year. It isn’t too late to try. Let this be the legacy of the sinking of K-159, a toothless but toxic dragon once meant to fire nuclear torpedoes but which now only bears nuclear waste.

JoeBuff.Com / Joe Buff Inc. Joe Buff, President Dutchess County, New York E-Mail readermail@JoeBuff.Com